"The 'John the Baptist' of the 'Disenchanted, Displaced Noncollege White Voter'"

"For the sizable portion of the population not old enough to remember Perot's renegade campaign, it is hard to describe just how thoroughly he captivated media attention and the public imagination, but a single statistic makes the case: He won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote, the largest share for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. He split the white vote with Bush, who blamed him for handing the presidency to Clinton, whose winning plurality was just 43 percent. (Exit polling disagreed.) Arguably, American politics has never been quite the same."

Todd S. Purdum at The Atlantic writes that Ross Perot showed that "[t]here is a big chunk of voters who feel disaffected, harmed by free trade, threatened by demographic change, and attracted to an eccentric outsider who promises to upend the status quo."